To-Do List: News Corp. Ponders Split; So Does Rielle Hunter

To know: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is considering splitting its publishing division from its entertainment division … The relationship between Syria and Turkey remains strained after Syria shot down a Turkish warplane last week … Rielle Hunter says she and John Edwards were together until late last week, but have now broken up … The travel Web site Orbitz shows Mac users more expensive hotel rooms than it does PC users.

To read: For the Washington Post, Krissah Thompson profiles Mia Love, who’s running to be the first black female Republican in Congress: > Other than her conservatism, there is little about Mia Love that doesn’t stand out in Utah. She is a black Republican, a 36-year-old mother of three, a fitness instructor and mayor of a growing town.

Now, her congressional race against a popular incumbent whom Republicans have struggled to defeat has made Love a minor celebrity among GOP stalwarts.

She recently introduced herself to a group of teachers, standing in the gilded state Capitol, which historically has been the domain of white men, by describing her Haitian American father.

Launched during the Bush administration at the behest of evangelical Christian activists and with the aid of congressional Republicans, the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative was designed to help low-income couples put a little sizzle in their marriages and urge poor unmarried parents to tie the knot, in the hopes that marriage would enhance their finances and get them off the federal dole. Starting in 2006, millions of dollars were hastily distributed to grantees to further this poverty reduction strategy. The money went to such enterprises as “Laugh Your Way America,” a program run by a non-Spanish speaking Wisconsin minister who used federal dollars to offer “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage” seminars to Latinos. It funded Rabbi Stephen Baars, a British rabbi who’d been giving his trademarked “Bliss” marriage seminars to upper-middle-class Jews in Montgomery County, Maryland, for years. With the help of the federal government, he brought his program to inner-city DC for the benefit of African American single moms.